


Graveyard of the Cybermen

by RedMenaceH



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Body Horror, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23583694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedMenaceH/pseuds/RedMenaceH
Summary: "They're built for short-term excursions before returning to wherever they have a base for maintenance. Cut them off and eventually they break. That's where we come into the picture, Doctor. You save the day, UNIT cleans up the streets and we do the nasty stuff. Resolving missing persons cases....and reclaiming anything of value."
Kudos: 1





	Graveyard of the Cybermen

If you were going to describe the smell, the stench, of the place, it would be unpleasant and sickly, ill-defined and putrid to an insane degree, always catching at the back of throat and no matter where you might go, no matter how much the ventilation system tried to scrub as much of it out of the air, it hung thickly and drenched itself into everything. Clean clothes? Soft to the skin? The stench clung to it with an impossibly tight grip. People would grow used to it. Spend years there and anyone could claim “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it” but very few would spend enough time there to say so truthly. Reassignments came and went as quickly as the applications were submitted. _Anywhere but Here_ had become the name for outward bound paperwork of that nature, no one wanted this, no one could stand breath rising from the depths of Reclamation Centre C, lost to the underworld of Dartmoor’s roaming hills as the sore thumb in the history of lost prosperity. Sayonara to the white heat of technology and hello to budget cuts, outsourcing and privatisation. 

-

To stare upon the face of the Cybermen should induce a clawing fear, the urge to run and hope that, if they caught you, the process would be quick and painless. This unit, dumped onto a reinforced trolley meant for coffins, laid stupidly, limbs hanging off from the edge, armour coated in muk, mold, rust and dents. It’s once pristine body reduced to a glorified mannequin, piping missing from one side of its head, now twisted back to what might have been a painful degree when it happened but now just lifeless. If it were active and capable of feeling anything, even a smidgen of its old humanity, it would be the lack of dignity. To end up here, buried beneath decades of invasions and schemes to end without success and abandoned, was a searing nightmare of unending wakefulness. 

Two members of Reclamation Centre C, both wearing facemasks, hurled the trolley down the hallway. Small talk fleeting and silence a blessing in disguise. One at each end, pulling and pushing and struggling against the immense weight of the tincan bastards from space. An errant turn might cause it to tip with a furious and uncontrolled speed.

“Seen the television in the staff room? It’s on the fritz.” Cook was a recent arrival, three days into service at Reclamation Centre C and proven to be fine, though unremarkable, at the job which asked little than to cart around whatever needed to be moved, inspect the Dumping Ground for anything of concern and keep the place running.

“Give it an hour and it’ll be fine.”

“Has it been looked at?”

Adamson, Jules to anyone comfortable enough around her, looked back at him with something edging on matter-of-fact annoyance. “Doesn’t need it. Before you ask, the doors and intercom system are part of it as well.”

“How so?”

She pointed at the sliding door up ahead and he saw how it moved to its own amusement, sliding out of view and then back as though it were following someone’s breathing. 

“Isn’t that an issue?”

“We’ve tried fixing it. Someone suggested it’s some leftover problem from the 70s. Would explain a lot.”

“The Tape Deck AI incident?”

“Oh, you’ve done your homework,” she said with what Cook wanted to assume wasn’t sarcastic. “Yeah. Been like that for years. They tried purging it out of the electronics, ripped its system out and, hey presto, the problem stuck around.”

They came to the door and Adamson stuck her foot out as the door receded fully into the space within the walls. “Go. Go. Push it through,” she urged, flapping her hand for added effect. 

He struggled, footing scraping against the smooth concrete of the floor, laiden with dust and dirt and specks of soil, until it finally went through.

“Christ! There’s gotta be a better way of moving them?”

“Figure out how to get a budget increase and I’d list them off for ya,” she answered and returned to her end of the trolley. “Come on. We’re basically there.”

The corridor came to an end with one door, the only not to close and open with the regularity of someone breathing.

Adamson banged on it firmly. “Rossum! Answer the door. I’m not lugging this tincan back to the Graveyard.” 

Cook gripped his upper arm tightly and grimaced. 

No answer came for half a minute before the door slid open to reveal a woman in her late forties, bespectacled with a pair of glasses fully enclosing her eyes and wearing what Cook could only surmised as gauntlets cannibalised off of a Cybus Type Cybermen Unit on either arm. 

“Miss Rossum. We have a delivery.” Adamson gestured to the discarded unit.

“Just the one? Looks antique.”

“Circa 1968. I believe.

“Probably. It’s one of those wetsuit models. I can work with that. Bring it in.”

“You heard them. Come on.”


End file.
